Quotes About Gullibility

I have a basic rule of thumb that about 2 percent of any large group will believe literally anything, no matter how preposterous it seems to the rest of us.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.

The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack's patients.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom; youth is the season of credulity.

Fish not, with this melancholy bait,For this fool-gudgeon, this opinion.

As circus owner David Hannum famously said, 'There's a sucker born every minute.' And, no, dear reader, it was not P.T Barnum who spoke these wise words.

Do not take to heart everything you hear.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.

Jim Jones had wanted his grand gesture to make an impression on the entire world, and, to that extent, he succeeded. But the Jonestown deaths quickly became renowned not as a grandly defiant revolutionary gesture, but as the ultimate example of human gullibility.

We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap.

Well, I'm a consumer as well. I go to the movies with my popcorn and believe everything I see.

The easiest way to be cheated is to believe yourself to be more cunning than others.

To serve a dictator, one must be gullible and ambitious and have no scruples. One must not mind being insulted by a Führer or else have an intellect so deficient as not to notice insults. Who else would fawningly and forever feed the vanity of a man who never listened but only spouted inane theories of conquest, racism, and economic nonsense, no matter how hypnotic his delivery?

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity, but a frequent cause of it.

If you suffer because of your belief in God or in the nation, that does not prove that your beliefs are true. Maybe you are just paying the price of your gullibility. However, most people don't like to admit that they are fools. Consequently, the more they sacrifice for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes.

Children are easily taught, for they readily accept and believe lies told by their elders.

The hoax worked because of the West's absolute belief in its superiority to people of color; if a savvy Westerner could not explain such a trick, it must be real. The rope trick filled a cultural need—and revealed the gullibility that such delusions of superiority inevitably create.

Those who know nothing must believe everything.

Americans so dearly love to be fooled. —Charles Baudelaire